The Great Graduate Diaspora

by rsbakker

Aphorism of the Day: The inside, at its most devious, will swear up and down that it’s been locked out.

First, I would like to apologize for falling behind on replying to comments: I hope to have an opportunity to catch up soon.

Also, I’ve been refraining on commenting on the FAN FIC submissions simply because I was afraid that it would stifle discussion. But I’m starting to worry I was mistaken. I’m thinking it might be cool to set up a FAN ART page as well, to keep adding to the amount of available content.

Larry at the OF Blog has actually reviewed both of the Atrocity Tales – welcome to the Information Age! Not only are authors effortlessly publishing drafts for universal consumption, reviewers are effortlessly publishing reviews of them. Larry is one of a growing number of ‘independent scholars’ who are helping tear down the boundaries between popular and academic culture. Over the past few decades the ratio between graduate students in the humanities and tenure-track positions has become more than dismal. I have friends with encyclopedic CVs who simply cannot find work anywhere within the Anglosphere–short of dead-end, poverty-level-paying sessional positions.

On an individual level, this is nothing short of disastrous. On a policy level this raises troubling questions about funding, since most graduate programs draw on the public purse. On a cultural level–at least I think, anyway–this ‘excess interpretative capacity’ has revolutionary potential.

Academic culture breeds ingroup specialization, which in turn breeds identification against non-specialists. The apparently endless rightward creep in voter attitudes over the past few decades, even in the face of middle-class stagnation and the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression, is a supercomplicated social phenomena with supercomplicated contributing factors. One of them, I have been arguing, is the thematization and popularization of anti-intellectualism.

For years now I have been voting for the socialist New Democrats here in Canada, not for any ideological reasons (I actually have many problems with their platform), but because all the economic promises made by the right in the 80’s simply never materialized–unless you happened to be rich in the first place, that is. The primary problem with anti-intellectualism, as I see it, is not so much the way it makes a virtue out of ignorance as the way it tribalizes claims. The brain is a reluctant problem-solver: it’s far more interested in sorting claims according to social criteria rather than evaluating them on their independent merits. So when a relatively uncontroversial claim such as ‘Money is Power’ is painted with the colours of the enemy, it literally becomes impossible to debate the kinds of problems that inevitably fall out of the concentration of wealth. Thus the genuinely crazy irony of working-class voters consistently voting against their economic self-interests at the ballot box. Trickle-down economics simply does not work. If three decades of middle-class stagnation aren’t proof enough, then what is? Meanwhile more and more capital/power falls into the hands of the wealthy, who happen to be hardwired to confuse their narrow self-interest with divine law.

Even right-wing moderates (such as the estimable David Brooks, or even the editorial board of The Economist) are alarmed at the trends.

The ingroup excesses of liberal academia, I think, and the mass reaction against them, have rendered a whole demographic swathe of the North American population impervious to any kind of traditional appeal. As soon as you identify yourself against, conceding claims becomes a form of ingroup defection–‘treachery.’ In other words, what was difficult to begin with becomes all but impossible.

What might be called the Great Graduate Diaspora could very well be the remedy to this vast and potentially catastrophic social short circuit. Barred from the very ingroup they have toiled to join, humanities graduates are forced to join the rest of us, to communicate to people not like themselves. And they’re also forced to critically reevaluate what they were thinking in the first place, which is to say, the nature of the institution they thought they were buying into. There’s nothing quite like being locked out to make you critical of what’s within.

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96 Comments to “The Great Graduate Diaspora”

I think the humanities has largely been overemphasized, and we are perhaps seeing a needed shift in the demand curve….sadly this doesn’t seem to have led the Left or Right toward a stronger pursuit of logic or understanding of statistics, economics, and general mathematical knowledge. My own economics degree is rusted flakes in the wind given how little I’ve kept up with it…

The worth of the humanities remains important, the worth of those who’ve chosen to study it much less so barring those like your self who’ve attempted to, as you say, communicate with the public at large. A refinement of academia may end up being quite the blessing, especially in America where greater computer and math skills could aid the economically disadvantaged.

The accounting is already going on. Humanities departments are being starved of resources all over NA. What I’m saying is that they could be succeeding in their social and cultural goal precisely by failing their institutional goals.

“I don’t see the necessity in your if/thens.” Such a generalization! I’m surprised. Sorry but I have to disagree with much of that sentence — though I’ll not say what parts of the sentence are objectionable.

“Thus the genuinely crazy irony of working-class voters consistently voting against their economic self-interests at the ballot box. Trickle-down economics simply does not work. If three decades of middle-class stagnation aren’t proof enough, then what is? Meanwhile more and more capital/power falls into the hands of the wealthy, who happen to be hardwired to confuse their narrow self-interest with divine law.”

Working class voters elected Obama. And, please tell me what the ‘working class’ is today? Are you ‘working class’ if you work and 8 hour day? If you wear a uniform? If you get paid by the hour? I work 24/7. I used to get paid by the hour. I’ve graduated. My eldest son works 24/7 (not for me). My youngest gets paid near the definition of ‘poverty level’ and he votes his interests in an informed and thoughtful way. Middle class stagnation is the result of so much more than a failed policy of trickle down economics. We’ve lost our manufacturing base, we’ve outsourced our labor, we’ve made bad choices as a nation here in the US, many of which were the result of arrogance on all our parts, many of which were the result of a maturing economy and a high standard of living, many of which were the result of years of misunderstanding the American Dream. Capital is more concentrated, yes. But the hardwiring you refer to, and the condemnation regarding the confusion of self-interest with divine law has no relevance in my business world. The most successful people I know are self made and generous, and they’ve never forgotten where they came from. It’s not a rule, it’s a perception that the wealthy are all self-interested. You of all people, Scott, shouldn’t confuse your frustration with a lack of self-interest. Are you less self-interested than your wealthy counterparts? Is it meaningful to expect a human to be anything other than self-interested? You believe in pure altruism?
I would think that hard wiring isn’t something that’s acquired – by definition, no? How then do you explain those who ‘became’ wealthy over time?
So, I have quite a few issues with your declarations. I’d love to agree and feel good about it. But I work too hard to simply do that. 🙂

And working class voters voted in the Tea Party candidates. The thing to remember is that very many slave owners were also generous, loving, giving people. There’s actually an important distinction between a person’s personality and their institutional role. As for the hardwired tendency to confuse self-interest for justice, well, that’s just a sad fact. It’s the reason we need a judicial system. If it’s invisible to you, Gary, it just means it’s your baseline. This is as true as me as it is you or any other human being on the planet. It’s just the way we are: which is why institutional integrity and education are so damned important.

You’re working class if you make barely enough to get by with no real chances of ‘getting ahead.’ Literally, almost everyone I know.

We live in a market system, which means that social power is primarily a matter of bargaining power. People with the most capital have the most bargaining power. If you live in a country where the political system is transparent to capital, it means they have the most political power as well. I’m just not sure how to argue against that. In America you have multitudes voting against policies designed to enhance their bargaining power, generationally now, leading to a Gini coefficient comparable to the one preceding the Great Depression.

But I’m not convinced you do disagree with me, so much as my word count! Don’t get me started on trade…

Me too! There have been several instances in all of the books that have inspired me to draw fanart, but then I usually pre-emptively give up out of poor artistic self-esteem. I’d definitely love to see more fan art, though, and think most folks do. If you’ve been itching to draw something, I’d say just go for it, irregardless of how the ‘community’ would receive it.

Then once the Second Apocalypse movies come out we can all laugh at how our artwork compares to all of the badass Inchoroi designs done by H.R. Giger.

A lot of this is to do with problems of attentional economy. We all have limited resources available to process and assess the claims that other people make. I’m a philosopher, so I’ll debate almost anything with anyone, but even I would probably make an excuse to walk away if someone came up to me on the street insisting that the CIA has stolen their brain (or something similar). What this means is that filtration and selection aren’t inherently bad, but entirely necessary. The problem is that the individual and social mechanisms that we develop to perform this vital task can become pathological. The trick is to identify and analyse these pathologies.

Although an analysis of individual psychology can be helpful here, I think the real paydirt is to be found in the analysis of the social networks we form. Particularly, I’m interested in understanding how consensus works. Really, there are two types of consensus: inclusive and exclusive. Most people only think about the former, which is understood as the common beliefs/commitments that a given group holds. These are basically the free premises that anyone in the group is entitled to use in an argument with anyone else within the group. However, what is more relevant here is the latter, which is understood not as the positions a given group shares, but those that it is willing to entertain within argument. Exclusive consensus is the way a given group filters what it needs to argue about and what it doesn’t need to argue about, or rather, which claims it needs to dedicate resources to assessing and which it doesn’t.

One of the other things that people often underestimate is the extent to which our abilities to reason about things (and thus to assess claims) are fundamental predicated upon our ability to defer to others. I can have a fairly decent conversation with a friend in a pub about black holes and gravity, but there are points where we will simply reach the end of our inferential rope, where we simply wouldn’t be able to go on using the relevant concepts in any meaningful way. In order to go any further here we’d have to ask someone with a better understanding than us, and this chain of deference would ultimately wind its way through various nodes in the relevant network of experts until it came to rest in a group of physicists who are at the forefront of the contemporary debate. This applies in almost every area of discourse, but very few people are on the front lines of some such debate, and most people aren’t on any. There is a tangible division of rational labour, and when it works well it means that no single person can understand every theoretical principle and practical process involved in the design and manufacture of my laptop, and yet it’s still eminently easy for us as a society to construct, distribute, and use them in our various individual projects.

However, these networks of deference don’t always work so well, and this is especially the case in those networks that deal with our practical reasoning about what we should do as a society and how we should do it. These are downright disfunctional, to be frank. There are different and divergent networks of deference, which are both very difficult to navigate and very difficult to force into conversation. The people who are in some sense at the forefront of both the debates over principles and the debates over their application are very rarely forced to engage with one another in anything but a parody of genuine rational debate. Instead, we are treated to, at best, truncated clashes between sound-bite size chunks of genuine arguments, and, at worst, PR and marketing campaigns designed to undermine our rational faculties, which transform the assessment of rational positions into personality contests or matters of loyalty and affiliation. The mechanisms through which exclusive consensus is generated, in order to efficiently deploy our limited (collective) attentional resources have become pathological in the extreme. Not merely inefficient, but downright counterproductive.

Here is the disturbing fact: the most detailed studies of the way we reason, both individually and collectively, the cutting edge of our scientific self-understanding, has principally been used to fuel the transformation of our democratic systems into a pale sham of everything they have ever aspired to be. Even those with noble ends have contributed to the abysmal degeneration of our ability to engage in collective practical reasoning about what we should do as a society by choosing the most vile and cynical means towards them. What we need is to use these same resources to diagnose and treat the pathologies of collective reason that even the most well intentioned members of our political classes have been tempted to perpetuate. In this respect, the great graduate diaspora is a potentially untapped resource. A vast pool of attention that simply needs configuring and plugging into our social parallel processing systems in the right way. The question is simply how to assemble them.

I would probably make an excuse to walk away if someone came up to me on the street insisting that the CIA has stolen their brain (or something similar). What this means is that filtration and selection aren’t inherently bad, but entirely necessary. The problem is that the individual and social mechanisms that we develop to perform this vital task can become pathological. The trick is to identify and analyse these pathologies.
But your measure to identify those pathologies comes from your example. Which is problematic if there is a measure of truth to that claim (some characters from Neuropath come to mind).

All this stuff is dear to my heart. Especially after my dust-up with Vox and the way he subsequently appropriated the cognitive psych I had used to facilitate his (overtly racist, classist, and sexist) discourse, I’ve been worrying that ‘spreading the word’ about theoretical incompetence could likely cause as much damage as otherwise. Skepticism is too easily gamed into serving parochial intuition. Authority gradients are simply too easily manipulated by capital.

This is why I think the ‘attentional resource’ battle is better framed as a ‘critical resource’ battle. Without capital, you simply cannot command attention. Infiltration becomes all important, cracking open the institutional reservoir we call ‘universities’ and letting it flood cultural production as a whole. This is why I see the literary establishment, for instance, as a profoundly conservative, reactionary social enterprise.

I think a fan art page would be great. Often times there is so much going on at once I get a bit overwhelmed and some of the scene’s details get lost on me, like at the end of TTT where there may be 5 points of view being thrown around.

Also, while I didn’t agree with everything said, I feel like this line “Barred from the very ingroup they have toiled to join, humanities graduates are forced to join the rest of us, to communicate to people not like themselves.” brought about an interesting point. Mainly because without out excess pressure, most people live their lives in closed circles. A little bit of forced communication between normally isolated groups never hurt anyone right?

An interesting piece, I agree if a large number of graduate humanities students are basically not incorporated into any tenure track positions or more likely not fully employed then they could have a revolutionary potential..but potential is only that, potential…I doubt in the short term that it will make much difference. What will be decisive is how long this global downturn lasts..will new political configurations emerge? Can this unemployed or underemployed intellectual stratum become as Gramsci argues organic intellectuals, able to relate and connect with the majority of working people of the US (for example) to create a movement capable of real change? This is the question that is central to any progressive movement at this present time.

I would urge all the unemployed scholars out there to check out skilled trade apprenticeships. It took me 2 years to get one after I dropped out of grad school, but now I have a whole class of fellow apprentices whose young minds I’m patiently molding into more critical thought patterns. It’s my one-man grassroots movement, and it’s exciting to see minds changing.

I had a website a decade ago, but web programming has now far outrun my meager html/css skills. Also, I don’t read enough others’ websites to feel confident I have anything new to contribute to the blogosphere. Perhaps I’ll make another effort, now that an esteemed author has asked me. And yes, the esteemed author is you, Scott.

Definitely the latter, Jorge. It’s more a matter of realizing that, being 7 years older than most of my fellow apprentices, I occasionally wear the hat of a role model, and so when I talk to someone about (to use a recent example) how geothermal heating works I’m sometimes delightfully surprised to have him approach me again a few days later and say he read up on it on his own. Other times, they’ll ask me what I know/think regarding some more academic or political topic, and they actually pay attention if I get up on my soap box for a minute or two. It’s usually the sort of thing they don’t think they could read up on and figure out on their own, but after I give them a bit of a framework to work with, they might.

In return, I get to learn from them about topics not near-and-dear enough to my heart to put MY time into, but which yield fun fodder for thought, such as the effects of various gearing ratios in ATV transmissions.

When Side ‘A’ is held parallel to a plane and Side ‘B’ is held perpendicular to a plane, Side ‘C’ can be rotated like a *compass* through extended space to form a cone.

Cones can be used in calculus. Cones can be used to find orbitals.

The base of a cone is a circle.

Synthesis of triangles and circles reveals trigonometric functions, and therefore much of geometry.

Congratulations! You just proved, entirely in your mind, the existence of Synthetic a priori knowledge by using Reason, the Logos.

p.s. Here are some other interesting ideas that use this knowledge:

St. Augustine, Immanuel Kant, and other philosophers have argued that the existence of Synthetic a priori knowledge implies the possibility of a supernatural entity or essence.

Other philosophers have argued that the possibility of a supernatural entity necessarily implies the existence of a supernatural entity. These theories take different forms but are called Ontological Arguments for the Existence of God.

St. Anselm of Canterbury made an Ontological Argument in 11th Century AD. Others to do so include scientist Rene Descartes, mathematician Gottfried Leibniz, mathematician Kurt Godel, and philosopher Alvin Plantinga.

In “The Age of Reason,” Thomas Paine writes during his analysis of The Bible: “I know, however, but of one ancient book that authoritatively challenges universal consent and belief, and that is Euclid’s Elements of Geometry; and the reason is, because it is a book of *self-evident* demonstration, entirely independent of its author, and of every thing relating to time, place, and circumstance.” A priori.

Pythagoras was born in 570 BC and visited Egypt in his youth.

The Great Pyramid of Giza was built in 2540 BC.

Some have argued that the pyramids and monuments of the ancient civilizations were primitive means to collect electricity from the sky.

Look at some of the symbols on a $1 Bill.

Benjamin Franklin taught us much about electricity simply by flying a kite. He was also a Mason.

An object set in motion by a linear force will travel in a straight direction unless it meets resistance or is acted upon by a force in another direction.

Electricity conducted through an open air wire travels at nearly the speed of light through a vacuum.

Electricity is transferred through the interaction of photons and electrons. Einstein wrote much about these phenomena.

Some philosophers have argued that all knowledge is reducible to sense-data, which are simply electrical signals travelling along various arrangements of nerve and neuronal pathways. These logical positivists made this argument in the 20th century to try to disprove the existence of synthetic a priori knowledge and ontological arguments in favor of atheism.

From plato.stanford.edu/entries/apriori :

“Empirical approaches to philosophy seem unable to do away with appeal to intuitions as the grounds for believing some conclusion follows from the premises, to support ampliative inferences that go beyond observations to more general claims, or to discover the essence of concepts that non-natural kind terms express. Pragmatic approaches to philosophy seem to require reliance on intuitions to determine relevant epistemic goals and to stop a threatening regress. In the past it was widely held that a priori knowledge could only be of necessary or analytic truths, and that all necessary truths were capable of being known a priori. Similar things were thought of a priori justification. In light of developments in the last half of the 20th century, all of these claims about the relation between a priori knowledge and justification on the one hand, and necessity and analyticity on the other, seem false. Further, a priori justification is fallible, and both it and a priori knowledge are defeasible, both by a priori and empirical evidence. Kant seems right in arguing that not only analytic propositions can be justified, and known, a priori, though many reject his account of how synthetic a priori knowledge is possible as obscure and unconvincing. Perhaps philosophers were mistaken in thinking that if there is an explanation of how a priori justification, and knowledge, are possible it must be of just one type. Maybe at least two different accounts must be given, one in terms of concept possession; the other, in terms of the inability to find counterexamples.”

Is there more than one shortest path between two points? Is there a counterexample to Euclidean plane (priori) geometry that can be understood intuitively? Geometries that require observation of the universe a poteriori to understand necessarily are already under the influence of universal forces. Intuited geometries are Platonic.

I have to admit that I’m not quite sure what your question is, Jeffrey. There is quite obviously no such thing as a one-size-fits-all intuition. Intuition has a notoriously horrible track record when it comes to supercomplicated social phenomena, and now we’re discovering that introspective intuition is probably just hokum. The bottom line is that the mere feeling ‘it’s gotta be true!’ is not one that should be trusted in most everyday contexts.

I am glad you like Hume. I am sorry you are stuck inside his box. Please read some of the philosophers I mentioned. There is much more out there than just Kant v Hume.

I read Scott’s reply. People a posteriori intuit things in different ways, sure. But every single person can recognize euclidean geometry and can imagine those forms in their mind. Otherwise, good luck driving down the road.

Not to support bizarre masonic armchair metaphysics, but I thought I’d leap to the rescue of Kant here. You can never read too much Kant in my opinion. Most people use him as a convenient wetstone for whatever particular axe they have to grind, as he did say something about pretty much everything (the benefit of systematic philosophy) and in many cases is the major touchstone for traditional debates (e.g., epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, etc.). I can honestly say that the older I get and the more I read him, the more I find worthwhile in his work, once the standard caricatures are stripped away.

For instance, try this on for size. Kant’s whole idea of ‘transcendental psychology’ has been heavily ridiculed as some kind of bizarre introspective mess. However, Kant himself was insistent that it was *not* as substitute for empirical psychology. He was instead trying to understand the faculties (subsystems) and the relations between them (system architecture) that are minimally required in order to constitute a rational agent. This is an (admittedly crude) attempt to provide an abstract *functional* specification of true AI, analogous to Turing’s functional specification of computation simpliciter. As I said, Kant’s attempt to do this is crude, but once you start looking at his work from this perspective, you can actually see some really interesting insights that most of the usual readings completely miss.

As a final point, there is nothing wrong with the a priori. We don’t need to be afraid of it. Hell, mathematics (including non-Euclidean geometry) and computer science (see Turing as mentioned above) have shown us the sheer range and power of non-empirical disciplines. The crucial thing to understand is that, precisely as Scott insists, the a priori has nothing to do with intuition. It’s not about another kind of non-empirical intuition, this idea is just stupid revelatory wish-fulfilment. It’s about reasoning that has *no basis in intuition whatsoever*. The crucial term here is *reason* as it’s this that provides us with the possibility of escaping the intuitive limitations imposed upon us by our cognitive architecture (just ask non-Euclidean geometers).

“The crucial thing to understand is that, precisely as Scott insists, the a priori has nothing to do with intuition. It’s not about another kind of non-empirical intuition, this idea is just stupid revelatory wish-fulfilment. It’s about reasoning that has *no basis in intuition whatsoever*. The crucial term here is *reason* as it’s this that provides us with the possibility of escaping the intuitive limitations imposed upon us by our cognitive architecture (just ask non-Euclidean geometers).”

From stanford: “Empirical approaches to philosophy seem unable to do away with appeal to intuitions as the grounds for believing some conclusion follows from the premises, to support ampliative inferences that go beyond observations to more general claims, or to discover the essence of concepts that non-natural kind terms express.”

Non-Euclidean geometries are a poteriori. Before the universe, before existence, there is no matter to do things like cause gravity, warp space time, emit electromagnetic fields, etc. to bend platonic forms.

Reason as you define it allows us to escape our intuitive limitations imposed upon us by our cognitive architecture. But you make it sound like our ‘architecture’, which I assume you presume to be a collection of atoms or matter and that mind has no special status or tie to the divine, just kind of randomly evolved the way it did. There are platonic forms all around us in the things we create. The words we use the objects we make even the objects nature makes. L – right angle. l – straight line. O – circle. Those are all platonic. The golden ratio, phi, is all over the place in nature. Electricity somehow knows to follow the shortest path.

It is impossible to connect the dots from these premises to the conclusions without some universal shared form of intuition. You can’t reason without intuition or you could never justify the simplest claim.

Just to be clear, because Scott’s replay was indeed obfuscatingly pithy, without this platonic intuition I speak of, it isn’t a question of understanding the meaning or ideas of what he or I write, it is a question of even being able to perceive and read what he or I write in the first place.

Or else good luck distinguishing I (i) from l (L). o from O. O from 0. and so on.

Saying the world is hardwired to perceive basic Euclidean geometry doesn’t strike me as all that revolutionary, Jeffrey. Moving from that claim to God seems pretty drastic. So why should our ability to navigate local space be anymore remarkable than our ability to perceive various wavelengths of light? And what could this possibly have to do with God?

“Saying the world is hardwired to perceive basic Euclidean geometry doesn’t strike me as all that revolutionary, Jeffrey.”

It was pretty revolutionary in Kant’s day. And in Euclid’s. Communication through written language would be impossible without priori access to universally shared Euclidean Geometry, aka pure reason. It seems to be ingrained in nature itself (and even the human form) as well as civilization as shown by thousands of years of craftswork. If it is synthetic a priori, as is self-evident, it is impossible to explain away from our observations of reality. To quote William James, “The attempt at introspective analysis in these cases is in fact like seizing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks.”

“Moving from that claim to God seems pretty drastic. So why should our ability to navigate local space be anymore remarkable than our ability to perceive various wavelengths of light? And what could this possibly have to do with God?”

I only use the term “God” as a placeholder for some unknown/unexplainable/supernatural substance/entity/essence. I’ve listed several philosophers who can argue the ‘why’ much better than I. But the importance of synthetic a priori as it pertains to ‘God’ can clearly be seen through an analysis of the philosophers of the Vienna Circle who tried so hard to disprove synthetic a priori, ontological arguments, and metaphysics entirely.

Also our ability to perceive wavelengths of light is quite remarkable indeed. Synthesis of circles and triangles reveals trigonometric functions which can be used to reproduce wavelengths, again all in your imagination.

A final point about light: If we perform a material analysis on objects, we find that they are mostly empty space. However, we know that light bounces everywhere very fast and that objects we perceive appear solidly ‘full’ of light. So where is my mind? If we presuppose a cartesian dualism or a heideggerian Dasein, mind is the light that is between matter. And the imagination is linked to the supernatural essence.

Pure reason? Check out this link. The robust inferential nature of formal systems is one thing, the kinds of conclusions we draw from them are quite another. The fact that mathematics or geometry is ‘intuitive,’ for instance, seems to imply that we don’t know what the hell we’re doing when we practice them, doesn’t it? Tell me, do you know what you’re brain is doing when you ‘reason’?

“Pure reason? Check out this link. The robust inferential nature of formal systems is one thing, the kinds of conclusions we draw from them are quite another. The fact that mathematics or geometry is ‘intuitive,’ for instance, seems to imply that we don’t know what the hell we’re doing when we practice them, doesn’t it? Tell me, do you know what you’re brain is doing when you ‘reason’? “unknown/unexplainable/supernatural substance/entity/essence”? Why presume anything more than ignorance?”

What is my brain doing when I use pure reason (when I use it as it flows, not distort it to my own ends)? I am bearing water, like the Cishaurim.

Some elements of your story mirror concepts in religion as well as philosophy. It is almost Theosophy. The circumfixion, for instance. The Gnosticism.

So I will answer with scripture:

Mark 13:11 “Whenever you are arrested and brought to trial, do not worry beforehand about what to say. Just say whatever is given you at the time, for it is not you speaking, but the Holy Spirit.”

Just open your mouth and say what the will of God wishes for you to say through the Holy Spirit😀.

I’m sorry your time at Vanderbilt didn’t go so well. I could only handle a year of that place myself (2000-2001).

If we are presented with the unknown, we can presume ignorance or presume a higher power. If we presume ignorance, then we consider ourselves the highest power in our world, and we struggle (jihad) with what we feel in our metaphysical hearts (pure reason) and what we think we should do as per society and our friends and laws and norms (practical).

It is scary to bear the water, and at first the results may not appear to my benefit. But if we seek heavenly/spiritual reinforcement instead of material gain, over time we see that submitting to the plan/will of God has self-evident benefits, psychologically, intrapersonally, etc. that justify, at least to the subject, the presumption of a higher power over the presumption of ignorance or the rejection of a higher power.

This always confuses me: acknowledging ignorance is arrogance (making ourselves the ‘highest power’), and assuming one channels the almighty is humility (making ourselves the servant of God)? Sounds exactly like the kind of self-aggrandizing bait-and-switch that humans specialize in, doesn’t it?

Acknowledging ignorance is acknowledging an inability, a lack of power, nothing more, nothing less. You literally don’t know what you’re talking about Jeffrey. It just feels that way – enough to inspire some to wage war, or devote their lives to charity. There’s no doubting the feeling’s motivational power, but the reasoning, I’m afraid, is as horrible as you would expect from a human. Did you read that Sperber paper I linked? There’s all kinds of solid research on this, none of it friendly to your views, I’m afraid.

“This always confuses me: acknowledging ignorance is arrogance (making ourselves the ‘highest power’), and assuming one channels the almighty is humility (making ourselves the servant of God)? Sounds exactly like the kind of self-aggrandizing bait-and-switch that humans specialize in, doesn’t it? Acknowledging ignorance is acknowledging an inability, a lack of power, nothing more, nothing less. You literally don’t know what you’re talking about Jeffrey. It just feels that way – enough to inspire some to wage war, or devote their lives to charity. There’s no doubting the feeling’s motivational power, but the reasoning, I’m afraid, is as horrible as you would expect from a human. Did you read that Sperber paper I linked? There’s all kinds of solid research on this, none of it friendly to your views, I’m afraid.”

Research is just as subject to bias as my anecdotal claims. If I don’t know what I’m talking about, I certainly can’t know what you are talking about.

I’m seeing results. I’m in the process of converting three atheists to deism. So take that however you like.

If you’d like a deconstruction of the paper you linked, give me a few days and I can provide.

You sound a bit self-defeating, Mr. Bakker. Raised the white flag already? Follow your heart and see where it guides you. You know what is best for you. Just heed Paul’s words:

Romans 13:9 For this, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Thou shalt not covet; and if there be any other commandment, it is briefly comprehended in this saying, namely, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

The Neoplatonist St. Augustine converted from gnosticism to catholicism after reading the next verse in that chapter.

Why should anyone “follow their heart” when we don’t even know what ‘heart’ means? On your metaphysical level, the biggest question has to be, what if it’s Satan who is speaking ‘from your heart,’ flooding you with inspiration, a sense of moral joy? How would you know? Wouldn’t Satan garb himself in the guise of God, devising a maximally deceptive appearance, and maybe that would explain why people who think they know the truth of God or whatever-it-is-that-invests-them-with-moral-authority seem to be behind at least as much human misery as lust and greed?

Nobody knows nothing, dude. That’s why the people who think they know never agree on anything.

My interpretation of ‘Satan’ is that, due to his pride in rejecting that Man is capable of good, he was indeed cast down from ‘heaven’ to become the demiurge on Earth. But some guy named Inri came along and lived a great life and proved Lucifier wrong. Then Inri came back and the Prince of the Air became once more the lightbringer, the holy spirit. Now salvation is intrinsically in each of us if we simply submit and conquer our pride. It sounds cheesy but love is the answer.

Romans 13:10 Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.

And that which converted St. Augustine from Manichaeism:

11 And do this, understanding the present time: The hour has already come for you to wake up from your slumber, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed. 12 The night is nearly over; the day is almost here. So let us put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light. 13 Let us behave decently, as in the daytime, not in carousing and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and debauchery, not in dissension and jealousy. 14 Rather, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the flesh.

Some say that Paul was a gnostic.

Regardless, “The Truth is what works for the believer” sayeth William James. I think you’re a good person, Scott. You’ll find love somewhere. I’ve found it in your books.

“I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.”
― Mother Teresa

Sorry again for the double post. But a great way to determine if you are on the right side of this: “This always confuses me: acknowledging ignorance is arrogance (making ourselves the ‘highest power’), and assuming one channels the almighty is humility (making ourselves the servant of God)?”

Common traits amongst people who have reached self-actualization are:[11]

They embrace reality and facts rather than denying truth.
They are spontaneous.
They are “focused on problems outside themselves.”[12]
They “can accept their own human nature in the stoic style, with all its shortcomings,”[13] are similarly acceptant of others, and generally lack prejudice.

“If we are presented with the unknown, we can presume ignorance or presume a higher power.” When presented with the unknown, ignorance is not presumed, it is fact. Otherwise it simply would not be unknown. Your approach sounds closely akin to a “God of the gaps” approach to explaining the physical world, where phenomena science has yet to explain are attributed to divinity.

Science doesn’t prove; science provides the explanation that has the best demonstrable evidence of being correct. When new evidence comes to light, scientific ideas are rejected or supplanted. When no demonstrable evidence is available, science doesn’t weigh in at all.

The God of the Gaps, on the other hand, is a philosophy of willful rejection of inquiry. It is an anti-critical stance, and one that I find it rather telling you didn’t distance yourself from. How long did you study philosophy? Or did you only study theology? All your references to non-Christian works are vague and sound like they come from encyclopedias rather than memory, and the implicit philosophies of mind you seem to espouse are 200 years out of style.

If we presume ignorance, then we consider ourselves the highest power in our world
There seems to be a leap here? I’ll propose that something in you rushes to consider itself a higher power, dragging you along with it. Perhaps it uses the absence of knowledge as a ‘proof’, in that nothing disconfirms being the highest power. But by the same token, the absence of knowledge doesn’t confirm you being the highest power. It’s just an absence of knowledge.

Just as much as when one is enraged enough the rage takes over and makes us swing a punch, I’ll hypothesize somethings taking you over here but it results in this highest power feeling (and the feeling then leads quickly to the conclusion/the punch). Just as one might choose to trust or not trust ones rage, have you decided whether you will or wont trust this highest power feeling?

That just seems to prove the capacity to hold some sort of knowledge about the introduced idea of geometry? Say that to you as a five year old and it wouldn’t make sense, because the idea called geometry, etc hadn’t been introduced to you.

To the extent you describing them, I think they do need names, Jeff. I’m inclined to think what is ‘prior knowledge’ is much like like livers prior knowledge to filter various toxins out. Anyway, you pitched the idea to Scott, so I aughta hold off for a bit instead of jumping in.

I can draw a straight line on a paper and you can compare it to another straight line on another paper and make the intuitive leap that they are similar in form by looking at them. You don’t need to measure them. You don’t need to name them. You just know. And so will anyone else. You can pick out matching shapes without them having names.

Anyone can connect dots. Anyone can put a square peg through a square hole instead of a round hole.

““Empirical approaches to philosophy seem unable to do away with appeal to intuitions as the grounds for believing some conclusion follows from the premises, to support ampliative inferences that go beyond observations to more general claims, or to discover the essence of concepts that non-natural kind terms express.”

“Anyone can imagine those forms in their mind” Is this an empirical claim? Can chimpanzees do this? Dogs? Bats? Amoebas? By what criteria would you determine that someone/something was NOT imagining these Platonic forms in their mind?

Ross
“Anyone can imagine those forms in their mind” Is this an empirical claim? Can chimpanzees do this? Dogs? Bats? Amoebas? By what criteria would you determine that someone/something was NOT imagining these Platonic forms in their mind?”

Good luck empirically examining someone else’s mind, or even your own. Where is it, my mind? A nice song by the Pixies.

I think you underestimate 5 year olds, Frank. Look at some of the toys they play with, they are strictly platonic. But not everyone has the same IQ. There are the few (recognize it immediately), the elect (recognize it after training), and the damned (too dumb to walk straight).

I don’t mean to boast, and I of course have little memory of the event other than what my mother told me, but she tells me when I was two she bought some puzzles for me and another toddler who was a bit older than I (I won’t speculate on the age but I want to say 4-5), and the older toddler just had no idea what to do with it. I on the other hand started playing with it immediately. IQ is weird stuff. Likewise, do they still have all those pattern recognition questions on the annual SAT/ACT tests they force you to take in school? The ‘what comes next?’ multiple choices like 1, 2, 3, 5, X (A. 9328 B. 7 C. Tiger D. Red)?

In case it wasn’t clear, there was a link in my last comment. When it comes to geometry, children are initially… I believe the technical term is “goddamn retarded.” Many concepts of length, shape, volume, weight and so forth we as adults believe are self evident and innately understood were acquired over time during childhood.

Young children, for example, can be shown that increasing grains of rice will tip over a playing card but still insist individual grains have zero weight, or cut measurement papers up when gauging a shape’s size in the belief that more pieces somehow means more surface area can be covered.

How delightfully condescending, although I suppose everyone here enjoys dishing out their share of that.

I’m not stuck inside any box. Well, no philosophical box. My brain might be in a vat, but that’s neither here nor there. I’m pretty open to all sorts of possibilities, but mostly I follow the old Socratic path of admitting that, in general, I know very little so I shouldn’t get too attached to any one way of viewing the world.

That said, there are some things that are pretty clear, and one of them is that it’s easy for a person to justify any set of beliefs by using linguistic/philosophical muddiness (what Scott lovingly calls “gaming ambiguities”) to match their internal and external needs and desires.

So, you might be right, but so might any of the other 7 billion 3 pound brains (or souls if you prefer) walking around with their own preconceived set of philosophical intuitions.

Think about the easiest one.

Free will. We have DEEP and INSISTENT intuition (a priori “knowledge”) that our wills are free. That when I move my arm “I” am the prime cause of this action.

This is why TDTCB opens on Nietzsche, because it’s one of the most easily accepted premises, and also one that is probably wrong. It can be disputed philosophically, and now more damningly SCIENTIFICALLY.

Of course, there’s also the possibility that this is all some magnificently executed Internet Troll.

“How delightfully condescending, although I suppose everyone here enjoys dishing out their share of that. I’m not stuck inside any box. Well, no philosophical box. My brain might be in a vat, but that’s neither here nor there.”

I apologize that I offend. I just don’t see too many followers of Hume or skeptics in general, although the world is a tough place so that path has its allure. Most Humeans I find never explored much philosophy beyond what they were taught in P101. I apologize if you are different. You mention brain in a vat so I assume you refer to Descartes. Did you stop at “I think so err I am” or did you read the remaining Meditations? He has an ontological proof in there somewhere, but I don’t think Kant approves. Kant may appreciate Plantinga’s, however.

“I’m pretty open to all sorts of possibilities, but mostly I follow the old Socratic path of admitting that, in general, I know very little so I shouldn’t get too attached to any one way of viewing the world.”

That’s perfect. Pragmatic fallibilism is a great stance, so long as it isn’t pessimistic.

“That said, there are some things that are pretty clear, and one of them is that it’s easy for a person to justify any set of beliefs by using linguistic/philosophical muddiness (what Scott lovingly calls “gaming ambiguities”) to match their internal and external needs and desires.”

Which is what James, Quine, Rorty, et al have shown. The synthetic/analytic linguistic divide as it pertains to concept possession is porous. But that says nothing about a priori Geometry, which is formulaic not linguistic.

“So, you might be right, but so might any of the other 7 billion 3 pound brains (or souls if you prefer) walking around with their own preconceived set of philosophical intuitions.”

But we can all drive on the right (differance?) side of the road somehow. There are a few objective truths it seems. Anyone can connect dots. Even at age five.

” Think about the easiest one. Free will. We have DEEP and INSISTENT intuition (a priori “knowledge”) that our wills are free. That when I move my arm “I” am the prime cause of this action.”

This appears self-evident to probably all people, I agree. And as such, I would hold such a theory in higher regard than an empirical theory that may be under biased influence.

“This is why TDTCB opens on Nietzsche, because it’s one of the most easily accepted premises, and also one that is probably wrong. It can be disputed philosophically, and now more damningly SCIENTIFICALLY. Of course, there’s also the possibility that this is all some magnificently executed Internet Troll. See? No boxes.”

Nietzsche’s writings were meant to free man from the constraints of the ego (practical reason) and he was brilliant in doing so. Objects in the world can have power over us, but only if we place the material higher than the spiritual. Nietzsche went quite mad trying to rewrite the superego (pure reason).

Khellus is free from the influences of the world. He has grasped the God.

I recommend Jacques Derrida’s “The Ear of the Other”, in which the post-modern Hegelian deconstructs Nietzsche’s Otobiography.

You may enjoy reading some G.E. Moore as well, the “Here is a hand, here is another hand” argument and the naturalistic fallacy.

Exactly! Theoretical intuition is so horrible, that short of the institutional and procedural contexts of the sciences, it is almost entirely unreliable. We had intuition before science–So the question you need to answer, Jeffrey, is why science was able to utterly rennovate and revolutionize the world in a few centuries.

You act like that technology was nonexistant in the world before. The Greeks and Egyptians weren’t cavemen. Much of their knowledge was destroyed by the Roman Catholics, etc. Destruction of library of alexandria, etc.

“The ingroup excesses of liberal academia, I think, and the mass reaction against them, have rendered a whole demographic swathe of the North American population..”

There hasn’t been any mass reaction against liberal academia excesses. There has been a mainstream media that manufacturers the consent of the people. This has required anti-intellectualism propaganda. Whatever the reality of academia may be, is at least mostly irrelevant.

There hasn’t been any mass reaction against liberal academia excesses. There has been a mainstream media that manufacturers the consent of the people. This has required anti-intellectualism propaganda. Whatever the reality of academia may be, is at least mostly irrelevant.

This is the flattering narrative, now, isn’t it? “We’re trying, but the System shuts us out!”

So if they’re collectively ‘trying’ (to do anything more than pursue ingroup prestige points), you would think the overriding emphasis on research and publication would be one of reaching out, of engaging popular cultural consumers rather than just one another. Is this the case?

What if the academic humanities, as a human institution, was no different than any other human institution in that it’s prone to develop self-aggrandizing and self-exculpating narratives to justify its (privilege-preserving) status quo?

The biggest problem, I would argue, is the natural one: the way groups tend to generate mythological and outgroup-antagonistic self-identities. With the humanities, the great myth is ‘critical thinking.’ But there are many, many other myths aside, exactly what you might expect from an institution putatively devoted to the human, but generally antagonistic to what the sciences are revealing about humanity.

Speaking of, are there any links to be had for examples of people reacting dismissively to a suggestion of “Money equals power”? My theory of mind kind of collapses in trying to emulate someone actually identifying that as intellectual to begin with? I mean, driving/operating a car requires more intellectual thought than that?

Aye. They cull intiution. And not simply by making another intuition bigger and squashing out the other. They leave it to some mechanism, where if X is, through fairly mundanely measurable means, the case, then Y intuition dies.

Jeffrey, I think theres a distinct difference between intiution that’s been culled back and not 100% trust for the rest and what you seem to be describing, which is following any inituition that flows to you.

Also, as Jeff said, science doesn’t prove anything. It produces evidence. The practice of science is not some source of confirmation.

Also, there is the subject of the humanities and the work they do in terms of cultivating and teaching critical thinking, and then there are the institutional structures, forms and demands. They are linked to a degree and the privatization of the university is incredibly troubling for the instrumentalization of the humanities, where the goal of learning and teaching is vocational and service oriented to the expense of humanistic model of engaging with knowledge. (Even in public schools in the US the percentage of income a university gets from the state is minimal. University of Virgina has the highest percentage, at 9%, I think. These percentages have been in free fall since the 70s).

I’ve seen the instrumentalization of political science as a discipline over the last 3 decades where political theory has been axed in favor of rational choice modeling. It results in students who want the formula and to plug in the number, not think their way through a problem. I find that troubling for the effects of a citizenry at large.

I agree with the problem of intellectual inbreeding, but the anti-intellectualism creates the circumstances of a vicious circle, as you’ve noticed. Professional organizations (like the American historical society and the Middle East Studies Association of North American for instance) have been dealing with this issue for years now (the latter more for obvious reasons and the former is just becoming attuned). This is important because in spite of the fact that north american graduate training is way better than many places (I am now in Europe and learning how little pedegogy is involved in PhD programs), I was still given very little actual practical guidance about how to do things. You just sort of sit around and pick stuff up as you go along and meet the formal requirements.

I think the potential you point out can also be attained in removing the ridiculous separation between politics and knowledge that still exits as an idea in the ivory tower. For instance, feminists (male and female) who struggled for a place at the table, are still demanding that their graduate students make the same sacrifices, citing the system as the problem, instead of making it a priority to engage with the problem of the system that requires you to forgo children (or whatever) if you want to “make it.” Knowledge and ethical ideas need to be more than just theories. Academics need to walk the walk, not just talk the talk.

And I am one of the lucky few who haven’t been locked out of the system.

Teaching is the great ticket to positive social relevance, without a doubt. If ‘critical thinking’ was in fact being taught, perhaps it would redeem the system. But since it’s almost exclusively rationalization that’s being taught – which is to say, what is perhaps the single biggest obstacle to critical thinking – it all too often devolves into what the Right accuses it of being: an ingroup recruitment drive.

“And intuition is still there every step. You can’t connect a to b without intuition. You can use science to confirm that it works in THIS world.”

You have to cull your intuitions though. Isn’t it striking how many intuitions are just wrong? Why is it that this A to B line intuition seems special to you? Because it happens to be right?

That’s tautological. Throw a million darts, one’s bound to stick.

Here’s my guess to how it all works:

If you could somehow ask an undeveloped fetus brain about lines, it wouldn’t be able to. Because during the brain’s developmental process (a lot of it happens after birth, I’d emphasize), many neurons and synaptic connections are culled via a cell-suicide process known as apoptosis. It’s natural selection, in a sense, because only connections that make sense are kept.

So, all the neural pathways that might give you the incorrect ‘intuition’ that a squiggle is the shortest path between two points are destroyed because they do not correspond to observed reality. Or maybe they are genetically hard-coded. After all, animals that made simple geometric mistakes would have been mercilessly culled by the hand of natural selection.

OR, you’re all just figments of my imagination and I’m a pot of petunias falling alongside a whale.

I was watching mythbusters where they had one of them swimming blindfolded toward a particular spot. And you could see him swimming in cork screws, but after he took the blindfold off he said he was certain he was going straight the whole time.

Trust your intuitions. Because as long as you never take the blindfold off, how is one patch of water any different from another, eh?

I’m sorely tempted to jump in on this self congratulatory circlejerk of leading questions and send off my academic studies with a bang, but at the same time even thinking of that as ‘fun’ makes me feel kinda dirty.

As the job market began tightening in the 80’s you had more and more of these conferences and journals popping up as more and more grad students began feeling the need to pad their CV’s. Lord knows I did my share. And it’s all but compulsory now.